What makes a site rank for more keywords?
 

As I've pointed out in other posts, SEO isn't my speciality - far from it. However, I'm constantly reading, articles, and keen to learn.

I have a question that I can't find the right answer to - that doesn't mean I haven't found answers, just not one that satisfies my curiosity.

I know of a website - its nothing fantastic - about 8 pages most of which are extremely thin on content. If you were to put the website through an optimiser, it would probably return the answer - "is this a website?".

However he's doing something right - he gets 20,000 visits per month and ranks for between 3 and 4 thousand keywords on the home page alone.

The home page is around 600 words deep - nothing seems to suggest it has been optimsed.

Now, all of those articles I've read that suggest a blog with lots of fresh content, social activity etc, might be correct, but it seems there are other ways.

Let's kick off by saying I know he does some black hat/grey hat stuff.

Firstly, he hides physical location of his business from Google by using an image in place of text (who does that in 2015?). He also doesn't use GA.

I also know he uses a private blog network. Some of his backlinks are from sites with very similar profiles - you know the stuff - payday loan article - e-cigaretttes article etc. The thing is, its not even a quality network - just badly written articles, written in India, then spun and jam packed with keywords. I saw one post with about 50 occurances of the same keyword. Most of his other links are extremely poor too - probably just a mild facade. He puts these sites up on a regular basis - I know of 4 or 5 previously that have been demoted or banned, but for the time being this one is sticking.

Anyway, thats by-the-by - what I'm really interested in is, how can a site with no little content, no social signals, no freshness rank for over 3000 keywords? It baffles me.